Events Archive

Feb
24
2014
Quantum Simulation Using Cold Atoms and a "Brighter" Future
Advances of quantum control in atomic and optical physics have made it possible to study intriguing phenomena originally discussed in condensed matter, nuclear, and gravitational physics. In quantum gas experiments, new insights are derived from out-of-equilibrium dynamics of novel quantum many-body phases. In the first part of my talk, I will...
Feb
20
2014
Probing the Origin of Supermassive Black Holes with Dwarf Galaxies
Over the past decade we have come to appreciate that essentially every giant galaxy, including our own Milky Way, harbors a supermassive black hole at its center.  These monster black holes, with masses of millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun, play an important role in the evolution of galaxies and the appearance of the observable Universe.  However, unlike stellar-mass black holes that result from the collapse of massive stars at the end of their lives, the origin of supermassive black holes is largely unknown. While direct observations of the first "seeds" of supermassive black holes in the infant Universe are unobtainable with current...
Feb
17
2014
Untying the Knot: Experimental Topology in Fluid Flows
  ABSTRACT: The idea that the knottedness of field lines represents a conserved physical quantity has a long history, having been applied to fluids, plasmas, and other physical fields.  Testing these ideas in the laboratory, however, has proven difficult: it requires the ability to generate and measure dynamically evolving knotted fields.  We have developed methods for doing precisely this in a fluid, resulting in the first observation of isolated linked and knotted vortices. Measuring the subsequent evolution of these vortices leads to surprising insights about the decay of...
Feb
12
2014
Predictive, causal modeling in the era of Big Data and High-Performance Computing
Feb
10
2014
All Optical Approaches in Attosecond Science
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Feb
07
2014
A Thouless formula for quasi-periodic long-range Schrödinger operators
This talk is devoted to quasi-periodic Schrödinger operators beyond the Almost Mathieu, with more general potentials and interactions. The  links between the spectral properties of these operators and the dynamical properties of the associated quasi-periodic linear skew-products rule the game. In particular, we present a Thouless formula  and some consequences of Aubry duality.
Feb
07
2014
TCAN Seminar: Introduction to Supermassive Black Hole Formation
Feb
05
2014
Measuring Happiness, Health, and Social Stories
Please note this is a WEBINAR
Feb
03
2014
The Birth of Neutrino Astronomy with IceCube
High-energy neutrinos are thought to be emitted by astronomical objects such as active galactic nuclei, gamma-ray bursts, and supernova remnants. However, due to their small predicted flux and large backgrounds from neutrinos and muons created in the atmosphere, they had not been observed until now. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory instruments a cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole to detect neutrinos mainly above 100GeV. In a high-energy (>20TeV) data set from the first couple of years of the full detector,  an excess above atmospheric backgrounds is observed. These neutrino events are incompatible in energy spectrum and...
Jan
31
2014
Particle Physics and Cosmology from Almost Commutative Manifolds
The unification of the four fundamental forces remains one of the most important issues in theoretical particle physics. In this talk, I will first give a short introduction to Non-Commutative Spectral Geometry, a bottom-up approach that unifies the (successful) Standard Model of high energy physics with Einstein's General theory of Relativity. The model is built upon almost-commutative spaces and I will discuss the physical implications of the choice of such manifolds. I will show that even though the unification has been...

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